The Times' Eric Deggans reports this morning that ABC News will broadcast a grand total of three hours from the extravaganza that we call the Republican National Convention.
It's no surprise, because at most they were only going to air four hours (Monday thru Thursday from 10 pm to 11 pm), and it illustrates the reality that you'll have a hard time reading in all of the incessant hype in the local media ; that is the conventions are a great political party for our two establishment political parties -Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on what essentially could be done in one night - nominating the party's choice for president and vice president. But that wouldn't be much fun, would it?
Yes, Mitt Romney's speech, and to a lesser extent Paul Ryan and Chris Christie's - will be news making events. And you can catch them on all the networks. You might see a little more coverage (but only a little more) from the cable networks. If you seriously want to watch gavel to gavel coverage, you're going to want to have your set tuned to C-SPAN or perhaps PBS.
(By the way, this is no different than was the case in 1996, when a very pretentious Ted Koppel announced in the middle of the GOP confab in San Diego that he was leaving because there was no news being made there. No kidding, Ted!)
On to the news: How many protesters are coming to Tampa? Nobody knows for sure, but despite the fears of Tampa City Councilman Frank Reddick, they all won't be bedding down at Voice of Freedom Park in West Tampa - because the park's simply not that big. The council yesterday essentially wasted an hour of everyone's lives discussing possibly booting Occupy Tampa out of the West Tampa location - but they had already made an agreement with owner Joe Redner to do so.
One of the things that some members of Occupy say they're concerned about is the record number of foreclosures going on in the area. Yesterday the city of Tampa said they've begun a pilot program in the V.M. Ybor area to try to make sure squatters don't take over those vacant homes.
Did you know that Roseanne Barr could be a candidate for president on the Florida ballot this November? That's not a fact yet, but the folks with the Peace and Freedom Party here in the Sunshine State have until the end of this month to qualify for the ballot.
And our recommended reading for the day is Salon's Natasha Lennard writing about the protests planned for Tampa and Charlotte (yes, she does have a quote of CL in there as well).
